The Nature of the Business Corporation: Its Legal Structure and Economic Functions

Between a classical firm and a business corporation lies a fundamental difference in legal structure. While the first consists of a single ownership relation between owners and assets, the second consists of two overlapping ownership relations—between shareholders and the corporation, and between the corporation and corporate assets. The latter legal relation is indirect and exists only through the intermediary of the corporation that performs the dual role of a thing and a person. This paper shows how such two–tier ownership structure of the business corporation fundamentally affects the form of its organization, the ways and means of its governance and the efficiency of its performances.
JEL Classification Numbers: D23, G30, K00, K22, L20.     

Schumpeterian dynamics: An evolutionary model of innovation and imitation

This paper develops a simple evolutionary model of innovation and imitation. It analyzes how dynamic interactions between equilibrating force of imitation and disequilibrating force of innovation mold the evolutionary pattern of an industry's state of technology and shows that in this Schumpeterian world the industry will never approach a neoclassical equilibrium with perfect knowlwdge even in the long run. The paper also examines the steady-state efficiency distribution of firms that characterizes the industry's long run and obtains some comparative dynamics results.     

Foreign Direct Investment and Labor Quality in Developing Countries

The quality of local labor is an important factor in a multinational corporation's (MNC) decision to set up production operations in a developing country. It is often observed that developing country governments attempt to attract MNCs by enhancing labor quality. This paper studies the interaction between an MNC and a local government which has superior information on local labor quality. The local government has an incentive to enhance the labor quality and share that information with the MNC because it increases both its net tax revenue and profit of the MNC. The paper provides an explanation for recent findings of FDI in developing countries: the bulk of FDI has been directed toward a limited number of countries and human capital plays an increasingly important role in attracting FDI.     

The real rate of protection: the income and insurance effects of agricultural policy

Agricultural price policies in developed countries aim at protecting farmers against both low and volatile world market prices. However, traditional indicators of protection only refer to the income (level) effect of policy. Following other research, it is argued that public policy can also yield an insurance (stabilizing) effect. In this paper a way to measure these dual effects is proposed. The method is illustrated with wheat market data for the USA and the European Union. Strong evidence is found that the insurance effect is an important component of protection, albeit a small one relative to the income effect. Policy support provided higher income and lower insurance effects in the EU than in the USA. For both markets, policy reforms in the 1990s led to significantly reduced income effects and smaller insurance effects. Without accounting for the influence of policy on income variability, traditional measures of protection will understate the real rate of protection.